What Does The Short Form “FAT/FAT 32″ Stand For ?

FATor File Allocation Table – is the name of a computer file system architecture and a family of industry standard file systems utilizing it.

The FAT file system is a legacy file system which is simple and robust. It offers good performance even in light-weight implementations, but cannot deliver the same performance, reliability and scalability as some modern file systems. It is however supported for compatibility reasons by virtually all existing operating systems for personal computers, and thus is a well-suited format for data exchange between computers and devices of almost any type and age from the early 1980s up to the present.

Originally designed in the late 1970s for use on floppy disks, it was soon adapted and used almost universally on hard disks throughout the DOS and Windows 9x eras for two decades. With the introduction of more powerful computers and operating systems, and the development of more complex file systems for them, it is no longer the default file system for usage on hard drives by most modern desktop operating systems.

Today, FAT file systems are still commonly found on floppy disks, solid-state memory cards, flash memory cards, and on many portable and embedded devices. It is also utilized in the boot stage of EFI-compliant computers.

The name of the file system originates from the file system’s prominent usage of an index table, the FAT, statically allocated at the time of formatting. The table contains entries for each cluster, a contiguous area of disk storage. Each entry contains either the number of the next cluster in the file, or else a marker indicating end of file, unused disk space, or special reserved areas of the disk. The root directory of the disk contains the number of the first cluster of each file in that directory; the operating system can then traverse the FAT table, looking up the cluster number of each successive part of the disk file as a cluster chain until the end of the file is reached. In much the same way, sub-directories are implemented as special files containing the directory entries of their respective files.

As disk drives have evolved, the maximum number of clusters has significantly increased, and so the number of bits used to identify each cluster has grown. The successive major versions of the FAT format are named after the number of table element bits: 12 (FAT12), 16 (FAT16), and 32 (FAT32). Each of these variants is still in use. The FAT standard has also been expanded in other ways while generally preserving backward compatibility with existing software.

FAT 32

In order to overcome the volume size limit of FAT16, while at the same time allowing DOS real mode code to handle the format, Microsoft designed a new version of the file system, FAT32, which supported an increased number of possible clusters, but could reuse most of the existing code, so that the available conventional memory footprint was reduced by less than 5 KB under DOS. Cluster values are represented by 32-bit numbers, of which 28 bits are used to hold the cluster number. The boot sector uses a 32-bit field for the sector count, limiting the FAT32 volume size to 2 TB for a sector size of 512 bytes and 16 TB for a sector size of 4,096 bytes. FAT32 was introduced with MS-DOS 7.1 / Windows 95 OSR2 in 1996, although reformatting was needed to use it, and Drive Space 3 (the version that came with Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows 98) never supported it. Windows 98 introduced a utility to convert existing hard disks from FAT16 to FAT32 without loss of data. In the Windows NT line, native support for FAT32 arrived in Windows 2000. A free FAT32 driver for Windows NT 4.0 was available from Winternals, a company later acquired by Microsoft. Since the acquisition the driver is no longer officially available. Since 1998, Caldera’s dynamically loadable DRFAT32 driver could be used to enable FAT32 support in DR-DOS. The first version of DR-DOS to natively support FAT32 and LBA access was OEM DR-DOS 7.04 in 1999. That same year IMS introduced native FAT32 support with REAL/32 7.90, and IBM 4690 OS added FAT32 support with version 2.[33]Ahead Software provided another dynamically loadable FAT32.EXE driver for DR-DOS 7.03 with Nero Burning ROM in 2004. IBM PC DOS introduced native FAT32 support with OEM PC DOS 7.10 in 2003.

The maximum possible size for a file on a FAT32 volume is 4 GB minus 1 byte or 4,294,967,295 (232−1) bytes. This limit is a consequence of the file length entry in the directory table and would also affect huge FAT16 partitions with a sufficient sector size. Video applications, large databases, and some other software easily exceed this limit.

The open FAT+ specification proposes how to store larger files up to 256 GB minus 1 byte or 274,877,906,943 (238−1) bytes on slightly modified and otherwise backwards compatible FAT32 volumes, but imposes a risk that disk tools or FAT32 implementations not aware of this extension may truncate or delete files exceeding the normal FAT32 file size limit. Also, support for FAT32+ (and FAT16+) is limited to some versions of DR-DOS and not available in mainstream operating systems so far. (This extension is critically incompatible with the /EAS option of the FAT32.IFS method to store OS/2 extended attributes on FAT32 volumes.)

As with previous file systems, the design of the FAT32 file system does not include direct built-in support for long filenames, but FAT32 volumes can optionally hold VFAT long filenames in addition to short filenames in exactly the same way as VFAT long filenames have been optionally implemented for FAT12 and FAT16 volumes.

Two partition types have been reserved for FAT32 partitions, 0x0B and 0x0C. The latter type is also named FAT32X in order to indicate usage of LBA disk access instead of CHS. On such partitions, some CHS-related geometry entries in the EBPB record, namely the number of sectors per track and the number of heads, may contain no or misleading values and should not be used.